The Short Story Hour - Volume I

By Rudyard Kipling, Daniel Defoe and Saki

These story hours come to you courtesy of Miniature Masterpieces who have a wide and excellent range of quality short stories from the masters of this genre. Do search for Miniature Masterpieces at any digital store for further information.

This hour opens with Rudyard Kipling’s chilling ‘My Own True Ghost Story’, followed by the dark humour of Saki in Tobermory and ending with Daniel Defoe’s early supernatural story; ‘The Apparition of Mrs Veal.

My Own True Ghost Story by Rudyard Kipling

Tobermory by Saki

The Apparition of Mrs. Veal by Daniel Defoe

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miniature Masterpieces
• Release date: Jan 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781787377080

Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was an English author and poet who began writing in India and shortly found his work celebrated in England. An extravagantly popular, but critically polarizing, figure even in his own lifetime, the author wrote several books for adults and children that have become classics, Kim, The Jungle Book, Just So Stories, Captains Courageous and others. Although taken to task by some critics for his frequently imperialistic stance, the author’s best work rises above his era’s politics. Kipling refused offers of both knighthood and the position of Poet Laureate, but was the first English author to receive the Nobel prize.

Book preview

The Short Story Hour. Volume 1

This comes to you courtesy of Miniature Masterpieces who have a wide and excellent range of quality short stories from the masters of this genre.  Do search for Miniature Masterpieces at any digital store for further information. 

This audiobook is also duplicated in print as an ebook. Same title, same words. Perhaps a different experience but with Amazon’s whispersync you can pick up and put down on any device. Start on audio, continue in print and any which way after that.  This is, and these are, Miniature Masterpieces. Join us for the journey.

My Own True Ghost Story by Rudyard Kipling

 As I came through the Desert thus it was

 As I came through the Desert.

 The City of Dreadful Night.

Somewhere in the Other World, where there are books and pictures and plays and shop windows to look at, and thousands of men who spend their lives in building up all four, lives a gentleman who writes real stories about the real insides of people; and his name is Mr. Walter Besant.  But he will insist upon treating his ghosts―he has published half a workshopful of them―with levity. He makes his ghost-seers talk familiarly, and, in some cases, flirt outrageously, with the phantoms. You may treat anything, from a Viceroy to a Vernacular Paper, with levity; but you must behave reverently toward a ghost, and particularly an Indian one.

There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form of fat, cold, pobby corpses, and hide in trees near the roadside till a traveler passes.  Then they drop upon his neck and remain. There are also terrible ghosts of women who have died in child-bed. These wander along the pathways at dusk, or hide in the crops near a village, and call seductively. But to answer their call is death in this world and the next. Their feet are turned backward that all sober men may recognize them. There are ghosts of little children who have been thrown into wells. These haunt well curbs and the fringes of jungles, and wail under the stars, or catch women by the wrist and beg to be taken up and carried. These and the corpse ghosts, however, are only vernacular articles and do not attack Sahibs. No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to have frightened an Englishman; but many English ghosts have scared the life out of both white and black.

Nearly every other Station owns a ghost. There are said to be two at Simla, not counting the woman who blows the bellows at Syree dâk-bungalow on the Old Road; Mussoorie has a house haunted of a very lively Thing; a White Lady is supposed to do night-watchman round a house in Lahore; Dalhousie says that one of her houses repeats on autumn evenings all the incidents of a horrible horse-and-precipice accident; Murree has a merry ghost, and, now that she